Explanation: What would you see if you went right up to
a black hole?
Above are two computer generated pictures highlighting how strange
things would look. On the left is a normal star field containing
the constellation Orion.
Notice the three stars of nearly equal brightness that make up
Orion's Belt. On the right is the
same star field but this time with a black hole superposed in
the center of the frame. The black hole
has such strong gravity that light is noticeably bent towards
it - causing some very unusual visual distortion. In the distorted
frame, every star in the normal frame has at least two bright
images - one on each side of the black hole.
In fact, near the black hole, you can see the whole sky - light
from every direction is bent around and comes back to you. Black
holes are thought to be the densest state of matter, and there
is indirect evidence for their presence in stellar binary systems
and the centers of globular clusters,
galaxies, and quasars.